Ethos Statement

Radford College is a learning community committed to the transformation of the whole person in service to God and the common good.

Truth Compassion Wisdom

These are our three foundational values that orient our shared life and we strive to live them. Our daily striving is practised as a culture of respect.

The founding Board of the College stated in 1984:

The whole of life is a search for Truth and for the living of Truth within oneself; a true man or woman is the acme of mankind. Knowledge is power, but knowledge without Wisdom is force without direction or constraint. Wisdom shows us how best to use our talents, moment by moment. Above all is that love, charity or Compassion which makes life worth living, helps each other, is a positive force for good and fulfils the law of God.

Our Vocation

It is our vocation to graduate students who find themselves through others, who love the world enough to act, men and women who are: awake to God’s presence and purposes; confident in learning, no matter the challenge, the complexity or the obstacle; accomplished in the skills necessary for clarity of thought and intellectual rigour; generous in spirit, compassionate in action; humble in their gifts, assured in ability, buoyant in passion; alive to community and active in it; masterful in listening; courageous for justice, living in truth; respectful, always, everywhere; trustworthy; realistic yet imaginative, creative and bold in possibility; at peace with themselves, freely disposed to serve the common good; authors of lives that transcend the material, rich in meaning, filled with hope.

The traits of the learner we desire in our community are:

SECONDARY SCHOOLA learner who is principled, open minded, self regulated, resilient, a communicator and a thinker.

JUNIOR SCHOOLA learner who is knowledgable, reflective, open minded, caring, balanced, principled a risk taker, an inquirer, a communicator and a thinker.

College Aims

To provide a purposeful, imaginative and enjoyable learning environment

To nurture student potential

To foster sound personal values and attributes

To encourage an understanding and acceptance of Christianity as the spiritual and moral basis of life

Exposition on values and their Christian roots

Truth Compassion Wisdom: names for God

Truth is a gift of life and sets people free. It is to be searched for, discovered, loved, lived in. As an emanation from God, truth is not arbitrary; what is true in one place is true everywhere. We belong to truth, not truth to us, and the condition of its sharing is love.

Compassion shapes and defines human character. It is the surprising face of God in Jesus and is humanity’s true identity, the fulfilment of God’s law. Compassion is life transforming, a gift to each other, bestowing meaning, even in despair.

Wisdom is the logic of God, present through and in creation. It pervades and penetrates all things, renewing all things (Wisdom of Solomon 7.24,27). In Jesus heaven and earth embrace one another and eternal wisdom takes human flesh. Practising wisdom is a synthesis of knowledge, truth, experience, history, intuition and love into a living that serves the common good.

Practising our Values

Our values hold together two simultaneous perspectives: one is distant, the other immediate; one is on the horizon, the other in the foreground. The first is like true north, the other works like a compass. Our values – truth compassion wisdom – orient our shared life and we move towards and into them. We put these into practice with respect.

Practising respect keeps the community awake in the present, accountable to reality. It intentionally puts our values into action; is shaped by Anglican spiritual tradition and the Christian name for God; and unites our values with our learner traits. Practising respect in the immediacy of one moment to the next, day in and day out always and everywhere, means that one day we will be able to look into our past and see we have lived in truth, arisen in compassion and walked in wisdom.

Our use of the word ‘respect’ refers to a threefold practice. To respect is to see again and be conscious of how reality is perceived. To respect is also to intentionally engage with reality and test it, without being judgmental. Finally, respect is valuing reality enough to act with love and in the best interests of the other, including creation. This concept of respect has its roots in an Anglican theology of grace according to which we are compelled to imitate God who creates, redeems and draws us into a shared and full life.

Beliefs behind the Values

Radford is an Anglican school whose values lie in the gospel with an ethic modelled on Christ, whose resurrection is the inspiration for our moral responsiveness. There are many names for God: Justice, Peace, Truth, Wisdom, Love, Compassion. The particularly Christian name for God is Trinity, traditionally annotated as Father Son and Spirit (another is Creator Redeemer Spirit). This name identifies the relational nature of existence, in which the wellbeing of one is grounded in the wellbeing of the whole. This is why we speak of people as connected. As a learning community in the Anglican tradition, we live our values in the way we practise respect and are committed to the transformation of the whole person in service to God and the common good.